No one on the commission minimized Pizzuto’s crimes, not the least of which were the brutal murders of Berta Herndon and her nephew, Del Herndon, in an Idaho County cabin north of McCall in 1985.
But the commission majority was persuaded that executing a dying man would become a lurid spectacle, something Idaho’s conscience should not shoulder. After spending 35 years under the shadow of a death sentence and in solitary confinement, Pizzuto is a dying man. He suffers from terminal bladder cancer, COPD, Type 2 diabetes, and chronic and coronary artery disease. He has suffered two heart attacks. He is confined to a wheelchair and is on hospice care.
Pizzuto has outlived a doctor’s prediction made in 2019 that he’d be dead within a year.
“The commission also considered compelling evidence of Mr. Pizzuto’s decreased intellectual functioning and deficits in adaptive functioning, identified through expert evaluations and brain scans,” the commission wrote in a statement issued Thursday — just hours before Little acted.
Assuming Little has the last word — and Pizzuto’s lawyers are in court arguing that the governor does not — what can we expect to see?
A botched execution?
Pizzuto’s frail physical and mental condition certainly makes that a possibility.
More than four years ago, Ohio attempted to execute Alva Campbell, who suffered from lung cancer, COPD, respiratory failure, prostate cancer and pneumonia. He relied on a colostomy bag, received oxygen treatments four times a day and required a walker. His cancer treatment left Campbell with veins so weak that executioners could not find one to insert the IV line that would administer the lethal chemicals that would kill him. More than 80 minutes later, the procedure was halted.
He died before a second execution could be attempted.
Alabama spent three hours trying to find a suitable vein on Doyle Hamm during a botched execution that stretched for three hours in 2018. Hamm, who suffered from lymphoma and cranial cancer and hepatitis C, was punctured 11 times in his legs, ankles and groin — and according to the New York Times, several of his organs were injured in the process. By the time the execution team gave up, the legal death warrant had expired.
Hamm died last year.
There’s a lot here we don’t know.
What about the chemicals Idaho will have to obtain from compound pharmacists — because the pharmaceutical industry restricts its products to save lives? To obtain the lethal compounds used in its previous execution of Richard Leavitt on June 12, 2012, the state resorted to exchanging a suitcase filled with more than $10,000 at a Tacoma Walmart parking lot.
How will those chemicals interact with the medications Pizzuto has been taking?
And will Pizzuto survive spending 30 days in even greater isolation enduring even more stress while he awaits the imposition of his sentence?
What’s the point?
The death penalty in the United States is disproportional.
Serial killers — such as the Green River killer, Gary Leon Ridgway, responsible for 49 murders, and the Golden State killer, Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., who pleaded guilty to 13 murders — will live out their lives in prison.
It’s arbitrary. Where the crime occurs drives the punishment.
Twenty-three states have abolished capital punishment. Governors in three more states have imposed moratoriums.
Half of the people sentenced to death in the U.S. were tried in just 1.2 percent of the nation’s counties.
Timing also is a factor. People were four times more likely to be sentenced to death in the 1990s for the same crime than they are today.
And the system can’t be trusted. There are 186 former death row inmates who have been freed on evidence of their innocence. Among them is Charles Irwin Fain of Idaho.
Yet Gov. Little has found something new to contribute to this monument to inhumanity — the elements of vengeance and cruelty.
Since when did these values define the Idaho way?
Source: magicvalley.com, Lewiston Tribune Editorial Board, January 6, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde